The San Francisco Emotion Map is the culmination of Christian Nold’s five-week residency and participatory art project that involved a total of 98 participants exploring San Francisco’s Mission District neighborhood using the Bio Mapping device he invented. During his residency at Southern Exposure, Christian Nold worked in the organization’s Mission Street storefront gallery encouraging visitors to stop by and use the devices during the weekdays and on Saturdays when he conducted intensive workshops. The project invited the public to go for a walk using the device, which records the wearer’s physiological response to their surroundings. The results of these walks are represented on this map using colored dots and participant’s personal annotations. The San Francisco Emotion Map is a collective attempt at creating an emotional portrait of a neighborhood and envisions new tools that allow people to share and interpret their own bio data.

SoEx Off-Site
Christian Nold’s Emotion Map project was part of
SoEx Off-Site, Southern Exposure’s yearlong series
of public art and related programs investigating artists’ strategies for exploring and mapping public space. These strategies can be traced to the Situationist’s derive, the practice of drifting through urban space, and psychogeography, the study of the effects of the geographic environment on the emotions and behavior of individuals. The yearlong series featured eight projects utilizing strategies such as simple acts of walking and note taking, to projects employing
high-tech and technological apparatuses as a means
to disseminate geographical and historical information.

Southern Exposure
Southern Exposure is a non-profit, artist-run organization founded in 1974 that presents cutting edge, experimental, risk taking, contemporary art and related programs including exhibitions, artists in education programs, public art projects, panels, symposia, talks, performances and publications. Southern Exposure is a forum and resource center for artists and the public. Programming is recognized for its strength and diversity, creating an accessible and supportive environment for both artists and audiences. No other local artists’ organization its size offers so many programs, with equal support of emerging contemporary artists, curators, arts-educators and youth artists.

Christian Nold was in residence at Southern Exposure from March 30 – April 28, 2007.

Generous support for this project was provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation, the Zellerbach Family Foundation, and Southern Exposure’s members.